Don’t Only Blame Gensler

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors have their panties in a twist over SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s imposing $393 million in fines on 26 companies that fail[ed] to track employee “off-channel” [personal] communications.

It’s certainly true that Gensler badly overstepped his bounds with those fines. The SEC, and no one in it, has any authority to surveil or to require surveillance of private company’s private employees’ personal communications. Gensler and his SEC should be swatted down—hard—in court for that excess.

However.

A major part of the blame for this overstep belongs on the management teams of those 26 companies. Those worthies demonstrated deeply disgusting cowardice when they meekly acceded to the fines. They’ve done a disservice to the companies of which they’re in charge, they’ve betrayed their shareholders, and they’re right next door to betraying the fiscal duties those managers have to their companies’ shareholders. Their meekness serves only to expose their companies to further government overreach, and it exposes their employees to further unwarranted (in both senses) surveillance by an overreaching government.

That betrayal vastly outweighs any financial “savings” from agreeing to pay the SEC fines…because it’s less costly than resisting in court. And it interferes with that necessary swatting-down, an interference that potentiates the likelihood of those future costs.

A Crock

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That’s the only term for the Biden-Harris White House stonewalling of a Fox News FOIA request for the identification of the nationalities of the illegal aliens that those two are allowing into our nation via their open-borders policy. Fox News isn’t even asking for by-name data, just aggregated. Speaking through their Customs and Border Protection manager mouthpiece, though, Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden and his Progressive-Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris are claiming—and they’re serious about this:

Releasing data for a particular nationality, or nationalities, that reflect a small number of individuals could lead to identification, especially by organizations familiar with the individuals.

And

The privacy interests of third parties (being protected from public disclosure because they could conceivably be subject to harassment and annoyance in his/her private life) far outweigh whatever public interest, if any, exists in having their information released.

This rationalization is a crock in two ways. One is that Biden-Harris are holding up identification of all nationalities because only a few illegal aliens, they claim, are of particular nationalities.

Another crock is the beef that the illegal aliens might be identified. They need to be identified so they can be gathered up and deported for their illegal entry, for their beginning their presence here with breaking our laws.

Biden and Harris also have it precisely backward in counting those third party privacy interests as more important than the public interest. We have a right to know who and what party(s) are aiding and abetting illegal aliens and by extension—intended or not—aiding and abetting human traffickers moving these illegal aliens. These third parties, along with such traffickers as can be identified and caught, need to be hauled into court and held criminally liable for their status as accessories to these crimes.

We also have a right to know who these third parties are so we can have a chance to assess the amount of our tax monies that is being used to support these illegal aliens and those third parties.

And this bit of cynical disingenuousity:

If such an organization were to move ‘X’ number of operatives of one nationality over the relevant period, and the disclosed nationality numbers were substantially lower than X, the terrorist organization could infer a large percentage of its operatives from a particular nationality have been able to move undetected (thereby minimizing the deterrent effect of the TSDS)[.]
…
This information could allow bad actors to reverse engineer effective countermeasures to facilitate undetected movement and activity and thwart CBP interdiction efforts[.]

The terrorist organizations and the cartels operating in Mexico already know these data. They already know who they’ve moved in and who’s been caught; this tells them how successful they are in their trafficking. To the extent the administration is serious with this claim, they’re simply projecting their own inability to conduct serious intel operations regarding who or what is coming across our border and where they’re going once inside.

This is the level of cynicism, or of incompetence, or both, that is rampant in the Biden-Harris administration and in Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ border policy.

A Mistaken Characterization

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The mistake is in the headline:

IBM Shuts China R&D Operations in Latest Retreat by US Companies

When an American business, particularly one as important as IBM, removes its R&D operations from an enemy nation, that’s no retreat. That’s an advance; the move makes it harder for an enemy nation like the People’s Republic of China to access our technology or our intellectual property to use our technology and our intellectual property against us.

It would be a further advance and further advantageous were more American companies, large and small, to remove themselves from the PRC and to stop doing business with the PRC and PRC businesses altogether.

American Culture

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Not what it is, but how to protect it. This is at the core of the culture war the Progressive-Democratic Party is so zealously fighting against us average Americans.

On the one hand is the Harris/Walz position of the US as a land of opportunity for all. On the other hand is the Trump/Vance position of protecting American values from outside threats.

The two positions shouldn’t be in opposition to each other. Protecting our values—our culture—from outside threats is what preserves our nation as a land of opportunity for all. If that protection fails, if our culture is materially altered by those threats, that which makes us a land of opportunity for everyone ceases to exist, and that opportunity disappears.

The problem here is in the Progressive-Democratic Party’s demand to define what those opportunities are and how they’re to be achieved. Party wants government—the government Party wishes to control—to determine those opportunities through its taxing programs and its social engineering-oriented expanding spending.

Party wants to dictate via government regulation what transportation we can have opportunity for, what products our businesses will be permitted to produce and sell, what energy sources we will be permitted to buy or sell, who will be permitted to vote, even who will be permitted to run for election.

This is as opposed to what is at the core of our culture: we—us citizens—decide what our values are, we decide what opportunities we wish to pursue, we select our opportunities from lists of our own devise or from none at all, creating opportunity from scratch. Choices may or may not include any of Party’s goals, but none of which are foisted off onto us.

Notice that: what we citizens want to pursue is much less enumerated, and that permits of much expanded opportunity and opportunities.

The choice is clear: Everything within the Party, nothing outside the Party, nothing against the Party vs we’re free to do our own thing, at our own risk, on our own responsibility, and for our own benefit.

Two Questions…

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…that answer themselves.

Can the US and its allies deter all these rivals—including Iran and North Korea—at the same time, given the decay in the West’s military-industrial base and the unwillingness of voters to spend dramatically more on defense?

Of course we can, and the path to that is in that last bit: spending more on defense (while keeping in mind that a Critical Item for defense is a strong offense) and refurbishing our military-industrial base. Convincing us average Americans to spend more on defense is simpler and more straightforward than it apparently seems to the journalist crowd. It’s necessary and simple to explain the nature and depth of the threat posed by our four primary enemies, listed in my order of risk: Russia and the People’s Republic of China tied at the top; the one as demonstrated by its active shooting war of invasion and steady threats to continue west if its current land grab is successful. The other because of its active invasion and occupation of the South China Sea, seizing territory owned by other nations around the rim of the Sea and controlling sea lines of commerce that are critical to Japan and the Republic of Korea and extremely important to us, its increasing threats to invade and conquer the Republic of China, and the cyber war it’s already inflicting on us.

In third place is Iran, with its near production of nuclear weapons, which it will use promptly to destroy Israel and then shop to its terrorist surrogates and to any others who’ll have the purchase money. This nation already shops its conventional weapons—at heavily discounted prices—to its surrogates attacking Israel and commercial shipping on the Gulf of Oman and the Red Sea.

A distant fourth is northern Korea, whose rhetoric makes them worth watching carefully along with shoring up RoK’s and Japan’s defenses and our own in the northern and western Pacific, but not much more than that.

And then it’s necessary and simple, except for those politicians of both parties, to reallocate spending away from the billions of froo-froo already in the budget and toward the defense establishment. The only really hard part (and we all know what “hard” means) is getting rid of the deadwood, both civilian and in uniform, in the Pentagon and streamlining development and acquisition.

For our allies, it’s slightly more complicated (but only slightly). If they don’t want to spend more on defending themselves—especially in Europe and particularly those European NATO members who already are betraying their fellow members with their sloth—then it will be time to stand up a separate mutual defense arrangement among the US, the Three Seas Initiative nations, and Great Britain (for starters), and then walk away from NATO altogether.

And

And if not, should, and could, an accommodation be sought with one of the rival great powers? If so, which one—and at what cost?

There can be no accommodation with enemy nations whose solemn goal, often stated, is to conquer us. This is the goal of Russia and the PRC. Nor can there be an accommodation with an enemy nation whose oft-stated goal is to destroy Israel and then us. An accommodation with northern Korea is almost irrelevant, and wholly unnecessary—just do the watching and regional plussing up.

The cost of accommodating nations with those goals should be obvious—such a step would only be a step closer to their goals for those enemies. Too, that would only be the first step of a short path to our functional destruction: having accommodated our enemies once, they’ll only seek a further accommodation, and then another, then…, until we’re no longer capable of effective self defense.